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Yiyun Li
Chinese writer and professor (born 1972) From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Yiyun Li (Chinese: 李翊雲 - Li Yiyun) (born November 4, 1972) is a Chinese-born writer and professor who has lived and worked in the United States since entering graduate school. She writes exclusively in English.[1][2] Her short stories and novels have won several awards, including the PEN/Hemingway Award and Guardian First Book Award for A Thousand Years of Good Prayers,[3][4] the 2020 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award for Where Reasons End,[5] and the 2023 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for The Book of Goose.[6] Her short story collection Wednesday's Child was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.[7] She is an editor of the Brooklyn-based literary magazine A Public Space.[8]
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Biography
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Li was born and raised in Beijing, China.[9][10] Her mother was a teacher and her father worked as a nuclear physicist.[11] In Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life, Li recounts moments from her early life, including abuse by her mother.[12]
In 1991, Li fulfilled a compulsory year of service in the People's Liberation Army[9] in Xinyang as part of her obligations before pursuing her college education.[13] After earning a Bachelor of Science at Peking University in 1996, she moved to the U.S.[3] In 2000, she earned a Master of Science in immunology at the University of Iowa.[14] She left a PhD program in immunology to pursue writing.[15] In 2005, she earned a Master of Fine Arts in creative nonfiction and fiction from The Nonfiction Writing Program and the Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa.[14]
Li's stories and essays have been published in The New Yorker,[16] The Paris Review, Harper's, and Zoetrope: All-Story. Two of the stories from A Thousand Years of Good Prayers were adapted into 2007 films directed by Wayne Wang: The Princess of Nebraska and the title story, which Li adapted herself.
From 2005 to 2008, Li lived in Oakland, California, with her husband and their two sons. During that time, she taught at Mills College.[17] In 2008, she moved from Oakland to join the faculty at the Department of English at the University of California, Davis.[17] Since 2017, she has taught creative writing at Princeton University.[17]
Li had a breakdown in 2012 and attempted suicide twice.[18][12] After recuperating and leaving the hospital, she lost interest in writing fiction. For a whole year, she focused on reading several biographies, memoirs, diaries and journals. According to her, reading about other people's lives "was a comfort".[18]
As a result of her experiences with depression, she wrote her 2017 memoir Dear Friend.[18] A few months after the book was published, her 16-year-old son, Vincent, killed himself.[12][14] She explored this in her 2019 novel Where Reasons End.[19][20]
In September 2022, Li published The Book of Goose, a tale of a literary hoax spun by two 13-year-old girls in postwar France. The New York Times called it "an existential fable that illuminates the tangle of motives behind our writing of stories."[21] In April 2023, the novel won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.[22]
Li has taught fiction at the University of California, Davis, and is a professor of creative writing at the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University.[23]
Li was appointed the Director of the Creative Writing Program at Princeton University in 2022, succeeding Jhumpa Lahiri.[24]
On February 16, 2024, Li's 19-year-old son, James, was fatally hit by a train in Princeton.[25] The Middlesex County Medical Examiner's Office ruled his death a suicide.[26] In 2025, she published Things in Nature Merely Grow, a memoir about the deaths of both Vincent and James and an exploration of the ways in which words fail but are still necessary.[15]
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Award and honours
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Li has received several notable fellowships, including the Lannan Foundation residency in Marfa, Texas; a MacArthur Foundation fellowship;[27][28] and a Guggenheim Fellowship.[29]
In 2007, Granta included Li on its list of the 21 best young American novelists.[30] In 2010, she was listed among The New Yorker's "20 Under 40".
In 2012, Li was selected as a judge for The Story Prize after having been a finalist for the award in 2010,[31] and in 2013, she judged the Man Booker International Prize.[32]
In 2014, Li won The American Academy of Arts and Letters's Benjamin H. Danks Award. In 2020, she won the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize for Fiction,[33][34][35] and in 2022, she won the PEN/Malamud Award, which "recognizes writers who have demonstrated exceptional achievement in the short story form."[36][37]
In 2023, Li was elected as a Royal Society of Literature International Writer.[38]
In 2024, Li was named a finalist for The Story Prize.[39]
Li was chosen to serve as a judge for the 2024 Booker Prize, alongside Edmund de Waal (chair), Sara Collins, Justine Jordan, and Nitin Sawhney.[40]
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Publications
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Novels
- — (2009). The Vagrants. New York: Random House. ISBN 978-1-4000-6313-0. LCCN 2008023467. OCLC 229028064.
- — (2014). Kinder Than Solitude. New York: Random House. ISBN 978-1-4000-6814-2. LCCN 2013017307. OCLC 842323189.
- — (2019). Where Reasons End. New York: Random House. ISBN 978-1-984817-37-2. LCCN 2018013429. OCLC 1030447783.
- — (2020). Must I Go. New York: Random House. ISBN 978-0-399-58912-6. LCCN 2019048747. OCLC 1125306132.
- — (2022). The Book of Goose. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN 978-0-374-60634-3. LCCN 2022022703. OCLC 1289234580.
Memoir
- Li, Yiyun (2017). Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life. Random House.
- — (2025). Things in Nature Merely Grow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN 978-0-374-61731-8.
Short fiction
Collections
- Li, Yiyun (2005). A Thousand Years of Good Prayers. Random House.
- — (2010). Gold Boy, Emerald Girl. Random House.
- — (2023). Wednesday's Child. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Short stories
Essays and reporting
- Li, Yiyun (December 22–29, 2014). "Listening is believing". Inner Worlds. The New Yorker. Vol. 90, no. 41. p. 88.
- — (January 2, 2017). "To speak is to blunder : choosing to renounce a mother tongue". Personal History. The New Yorker. Vol. 92, no. 43. pp. 30–33.
- Li, Yiyun (October 31, 2024). "The Seventy Percent". Harper's Magazine[63]
- — (March 31, 2025). "The deaths—and lives—of two sons". Personal History. The New Yorker. Vol. 101, no. 6. pp. 38–47. Printed under the title "A matter of facts".
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References
External links
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